Coming to SteamOS/Linux

About This Game

Emperor Edition is the definitive edition of ROME II, featuring an improved politics system, overhauled building chains, rebalanced battles and improved visuals in both campaign and battle.

In addition, Emperor Edition includes all content and feature updates made available for ROME II since its launch in September 2013. These include Twitch.TV integration, touchscreen controls, new playable factions and units, and Mac compatibility.
The Imperator Augustus Campaign Pack and all Emperor Edition content and features are free, via automatic update, to all existing ROME II owners.

About the Imperator Augustus Campaign Pack

The Imperator Augustus Campaign Pack is a new playable campaign for ROME II, which rivals the original ROME II Grand Campaign in both scope and scale. This campaign comes as part of Total War™: ROME II – Emperor Edition and is available as a free, automatic update to existing owners of Total War™: ROME II.
The Imperator Augustus Campaign Pack is set in 42 BC during the chaotic aftermath of Caesar’s grisly murder. The republic remains whole, but its soul is divided as three great men, the members of the Second Triumvirate, hold the future of Rome in the palms of their hands.

Octavian, Caesar’s adoptive son and the heir to his legacy.

Marc Antony, Caesar’s loyal friend and most trusted lieutenant.

Lepidus, Pontifex Maximus of Rome and the man who secured Caesar’s dictatorship.

With the territories of The Republic divided between them and the military might of Rome at their beck-and-call, the members of The Second Triumvirate are each in a position to make a bid for leadership, and rule Rome as its first – and only – emperor.

However, external forces are on the move, looking to exploit the instability of Rome and expand their own territories. Will you fight as a defender of Rome and defeat the other members of the Triumvirate? Or lead another faction on a campaign of conquest and expansion, and take advantage of the chaos as the Roman civil war rages?

Playable Factions

Players may embark on a new Campaign as one of the following playable factions:
Marc Antony
Lepidus
Octavian
Pompey
Iceni
Marcomanni
Dacia
Egypt
Parthia
Armenia (also now playable in the ROME II Grand Campaign).

How far will you go for Rome?

The award-winning Total War series returns to Rome, setting a brand new quality benchmark for Strategy gaming. Become the world’s first superpower and command the Ancient world’s most incredible war machine. Dominate your enemies by military, economic and political means. Your ascension will bring both admiration and jealousy, even from your closest allies.

Will you suffer betrayal or will you be the first to turn on old friends? Will you fight to save the Republic, or plot to rule alone as Emperor?

✢ Build vast armies and take to the battlefield in real-time combat mode. Put your tactical skills to the test as you directly control tens of thousands of men clashing in epic land and sea battles.

✢ Play for the glory of Rome as one of three families or take command of a huge variety of rival civilisations – each offers a notably different form of gameplay experience with hundreds of unique units from siege engines and heavy cavalry to steel-plated legionaries and barbarian berserkers.

✢ See exotic ancient cities and colossal armies rendered in incredible detail, as jaw-dropping battles unfold. Detailed camera perspectives allow you to see your men shout in victory or scream in pain on the frontline, while a new tactical cam allows a god’s eye view of the carnage to better inform your strategic decisions.

*This review is a statement against recent Total War titles marketing scheme*

This recommendation will stay negative unless Creative Assembly and Sega demonstrate to Total war fans that future Total War games will not be plagued by abusive and overpriced downloadable content (as is The Viking Forefathers ''Culture pack'', and the Longbeards ''Culture Pack'' in Attila - same with culture DLCs in this game. We have to pay to unlock an excisting file).

Sega and Creative Assembly, show some respect to Total War fans.

We have paid for a complete game. Could you do us the honor of delivering one?

Ignoring that this game was an absolute joke on release day (yes, I'm still bitter about getting duped into pre-ordering so I could use one of the factions included in the game without having to pay for it), it's still a huge disappointment. The Emperor Edition is a massive improvement, but still falls way short of what was promised. Even with all the patches, the game is a big step back from Shogun 2.

Firstly, the game is lifeless and boring. I've yet to even get close to year 0 in a save and I've probably started about 20 of them. Just look at the hours I've spent playing this game. I've tried so hard since the day it was released to get into a save in this game, and it's never happened. All of the screenshots and promotional media for this game looked amazing and captivating, but that feeling never materalizes in the actual game. I never have the urge to expand my empire, or make my enemies pay for crossing me. It just feels like I'm engaging in a strategy (if you want to call it that) exercise against AI, nothing more. CA have sucked the life out of this series by dumbing down things like politics and diplomacy, and removing things like family trees for no aparent reason. The best feeling I got from this game was when I finally accepted that I wasted my money on it and uninstalled it from my system.

The AI is still horrendously bad. It's a million times better than it was at release, but it's still terrible. It's so easy to learn AI tendencies, and it takes a huge amount of restraint to stop myself from exploiting them. Battle AI is really bad, but luckily there are a lot of mods that can fix this and actually make it enjoyable. At the same time, there's only so much modders can do to cover up CA's mistakes, and it's really sad that CA needs other people to fix their game for them to make it playable.

Campaign AI is atrocious and not even challenging. There's hardly any logic in the strategy of AI factions. They don't seem to care about defending their cities and they never create any type of organized, strategic attack. The only way to make the game challenging is to put the difficulty on very hard, so the AI can just churn out full stacks at will and send them at you one by one. Even then, it just turns into a game of fending off the armies, one or two at a time, until the AI does something inexplicably stupid to give you the advantage. It's extremely frustrating to have a back and forth war with an AI faction over one of its settlements, only to have that faction just randomly move all of its armies away from that settlement, basically allowing you to walk right in and take it. This type of thing happens ALL OF THE TIME and takes all of the intensity and excitment out of wars.

Some parts of the game are still broken, even in the Emperor Edition. Sieges are somehow even worse than Shogun 2. City gates are broken. Any unit can just burn down a gate by throwing flaming sticks at it, but then they are unable to walk through it. I'm not even sure if battering rams work at all. Ladders and siege towers kind of work though (at least with the overhaul mod that I've used), so there's that.

Obviously the game is still addicting in some way, as it's managed to get me to pour 200+ hours into it, but it feels more like I've wasted a massive part of my life trying to get this game to entertain me than anything else. People who have never played a Total War game before may find this game neat because of the setting and the battles (which are absolutely a standout feature for this series when compared to other strategy games), but those of us who have played TW games before know how much of a disappointment this was. For those who disagree with me: go back and look at the promotional videos that CA released prior to the game's launch and compare that to what we paid for. I've not experienced anything close to what was advertised, and I've yet to see anyone who has been able to make this game look anywhere near the way it did in the videos of the ♥♥♥♥in alpha (that CA said was still going to be further optimized). It still looks cool at times--some of the cities having unique features on the battle map is a really cool feature, and the campaign map looks by far the best it has in any game of the series.

Overall, Rome 2 was a huge failure and a waste of time for everyone involved. It actually compares really unfavorably to Rome 1 and Medeival 2 from 10 years ago. CA has already rushed into making another game, Atilla, which is really just a remake of one of Rome 1's expansions released as a full game. I will not even be touching that game unless it gets great reviews and goes on sale for <$20. You'd have to be a fool to preorder that game after the trainwreck that was Rome 2's launch. CA has used up all the good faith it built from its early games and deserves to be under heavy scrutiny going forward.

As for anyone thinking about buying this game, I would strongly recommend not to. Even if its heavily discounted, it's really not worth the time that you will pour into it before finally accepting that it's just not a good game. I would suggest waiting for Atilla's release and seeing what the community consensus is (let's not forget how many gaming websites gave Rome 2 highly favorable reviews at launch). Hopefully CA will get its act together and release what Rome 2 should have been.

TLDR:

Pros+Campaign map looks really good compared to other games in the series+Modding community is amazing and did CA a huge favor by saving this game before CA could make it playable on its own

Cons-The AI is so bad that it's really hard to actually use strategy in a meaningful way-No immersion due to features from previous games being streamlined or removed-Game was released with numerous broken features and many of these features still remain broken despite all the patches-Really disappoints graphically in a lot of areas

As an owner of every single Total War game up until recently, this is another game I wanted to like but never managed to.

The game has advanced graphically, but not in other aspects. Some mechanics have changed, lacking real innovations and its hard to objectively say any single new mechanic is "better" then its previous iteration.

Waiting times ingame are very long, loading is frequent and time-consuming. Even on a healthy quadcore with plenty of RAM, the game is very slow overall. An SSD would adress the loading times, but would do nothing for the slow decission-making process the AI seems to suffer from.

I remember having similar issues with Rome: Total War. As my hardware improved over the years, this game became a lot more fluent.

Perhaps in a few years the hardware will be available to make this game play with the fluency required for some level of immersion. Currently, this is too slow of a game for me, making me stick to older incarnations of the game.

As a final point, given all the above, the price is far too high, and bringing out DLC while having a faulty base-product, is really low.

I just spent some time with the Emperor's Edition for this free weekend, and came away fairly unimpressed with Rome 2. I was a huge fan of Rome 1, and I feel this game is inferior to it in almost every way.

1. Graphics: Rome 2 looks very good at high settings. The units on the battle map are fairly detailed, the terrain looks decent and the effects are nice. The campaign map also looks gorgeous.

2. The AI does a fairly good job on the battle maps. They attack in unison, send in their infantry to charge while their light/missile infantry support from behind, they actively send their cavalry around your main force and try to flank you. Overall, well done.

That's about all the good I have to say about Rome 2 though.

3. The UI during battles. It is completely useless. The game needs a simple, organized UI that lets you easily distinguish between units. The pictures on the unit cards are such that it makes it farily difficult to tell apart different units when clicking on their cards. Also, the current status(es) of the unit flash at the centre of each card in 1-2 second intervals. This means I need to wait up to 5-6 seconds just looking at a specific unit's card to see if they are under enemy missile fire, routing, or whatever. This is competely useless and unacceptable when previous TW games dealt with this much more efficiently.

Also, the lack of walls and siege equipment. WTF happenned there? One of the most fun battles you could have in Rome 1 was assaulting a huge city with a full army of light/heavy infantry, archers, cavalry, and most importantly, trebuchets. The onagers available in Rome 2 are fairly weak and just not as satisfying to use to wreak havoc in an enemy's city.

Another big issue is the campaign map province system, which makes it so that only the provincial capitals have large walls. All other settlements are minor, with to walls defending them. This makes it very easy to steamroll the majority of enemy settlements you encounter, and makes the overall campaign much too easy.

Speaking of the campaign map.... although it does look gorgeous now, much of its openness from previous TW games is gone. Italy especially feels just like a highway connecting 1 settlement to another. This is a problem because the game forces you on a linear path between settlements, rather than letting you do whatever you want.

Diplomacy is still an issue. The AI will propose stupid deals on a regular basis. For example, I would propose a mutually beneficial trade agreement and have it rejected. 5 turns later, I get an offer from that faction for a trade agreement, but they also want 4000 gold. Or I will almost destroy an enemy, and when they have 1 city left they request peace, but also want me to pay 10 000 gold to them for that peace... when I have a full army beside their last city and they have 5 units defending it.

The AI has some issues on the campaign map as well. There have been numerous times on the campaign map when I am holding a city wih a garrison of 20 units, and I am attacked by armies of 4-8 units, which are of course massacred by my forces. Thankfully, the AI works well on the battle maps.

Naval battles are an exercise in frustration and poorly implemented. You have little incentive to build actual navies, since when you order an army on water, they magically transform into transports. This is very frustrating when you have several enemy ports blockaded, only for them to send a random small force to attack one of your settlement behind the front lines... ♥♥♥♥ing seriously? Those transports will usually be a match for actual navy ships... making navies completely useless in the game.

Unit collision was a big problem in Empire/Napoleon, although I did not find it to be a big issue in Rome 2, despite it using the same engine. The formations are nowhere near as clear/fluid as in Rome 1, but unit-on-unit combat works fairly well. A unit of 60 cavalry charging into a unit of 80-120 light/missile infantry will make short work of them in a few seconds. However, combat between heavy infantry units is a bit of an issue. The units tend to lose formation and congregate into a blob, which kills the immersion and makes it frustrating to try to command units.

Lastly, the price. The game is a complete rip-off for $66.50 CAD, especially given the almost $100 of DLCs. The greek states should have been included in the base game, as should have blood/gore. Charging additional money for blood and gore is completely ♥♥♥♥ing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (yes, it was for the rating. Well, ♥♥♥♥ your rating). Some DLCs are cool and worth it on their own, but it feels like there was basic content cut from the game just to be sold as DLC, which is unacceptable.

I held off buying Rome 2 for a long time, and after spending a weekend playing it, I refuse to pay CA for this game. Yes, it is quite a fun game, but it could have been so much more, and as a sequel, it ultimately just makes me want to go back and play Rome 1.

Well.... maybe I will buy it, but once it gets to under $15 CAD with all the DLCs. Otherwise, the game is simply not worth it, even at $16.50 + $20 for DLCs.

Edit: I purchased Rome: Total War Gold Edition and started a campaign in the original and in the Barbarian Invasion expansion. Comparing vanilla to vanilla, Rome 1 feels a lot more polished/better done and a lot more immersive. Very happy with the RTW Gold purchase.